“Here’s what happened: I was sent a bad, hateful email,” Dolan said. “I get emails all the time, like I’m sure you understand. I generally don’t respond to the bad ones. This one, it caught me at the wrong moment and I responded sort of like tit for tat. […] I knew I shouldn’t have done that, but I did it anyway because it made me angry — it was a personal, hateful attack. Basically it’s over and we got All-Star Weekend. I’d love it if we all just focused on that.”

Asked if he had a message to Knicks fans, Dolan said: “There is a message. Because I actually got a whole bunch of emails that were very, very nice. I didn’t get all bad emails. More than I can respond to right now. If you have written to me a nice email, an encouraging one, or I’m unhappy about losing, you’re actually going to hear back from me. If you wrote one of those other kind of emails, you’re not going to hear back from me. For those who wrote those, thanks for being so nice.”